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Kent county council director of ICT Peter Bole tells Jo Best about how local authority’s IT strategy is underpinning its customer service aims

Every CIO knows that good business change needs to go hand in hand with IT transformation. For Kent county council’s director of ICT Peter Bole, it’s the lever that will move the local authority’s customer service strategy.

Thestrategy, published in 2011, has the joint aims of providing better customer service to those who live, work or visit Kent, and at the same time reducing the council’s costs.

One of the pledges in the customer services strategy is that by 2015, Kent’s citizens will be able to contact the council in the way and at the time they prefer, while getting the same standard of response whichever channel they use. Another pledge sees the council striving to understand its users better by gathering and analysing information about their needs and preferences. Both pledges must be underpinned by a shift in the council’s technology landscape.

Consequently, Kent’s IT strategy is now intertwined with its customer service strategy a move that presents an interesting change in the remit of its IT team.

Where once Kent’s IT workers would have had to provide services for council staff during the normal working week with just a little out of hours support, it now has a whole different user base to serve. Thanks to the growing range of online services the council offers, the IT department must cater to both council staff and the county’s residents, businesses, and others, who expect 24/7 access to services.

It is a shift that has brought new challenges, not least that the new, public user base has had its standards set by the giants of online shopping and entertainment.

"When you start ensuring online access to public services, most people will have had their experience informed by Amazon and the BBC website. It’s the same with regards to availability of those services: if it goes wrong and it’s 10pm, you expect to have something done about it," Bole says.

Late nights aside, the benefit to the council of having residents access services online is clear. The customer service strategy cites research by IT body Socitm which found that serving a user face-to-face costs £7.40, compared to 32p for the same action performed online.

While in the past, government’s ambitions on online services have run ahead of users’ needs, according to Bole – who recalls the early 2000s e-government initiatives that tried to encourage the take up of online services before most users had broadband – now it is users that are setting the pace of channel shift.

"The advent of certain technologies, whether it be tablets or smartphones, will actually do more to drive the agenda than someone sitting in county hall or Whitehall saying, ‘This is a marvellous opportunity, we’ll build it and people will come.’ I think from the government perspective, we need to respond to the way technology is being used in the community rather than being in a position to drive the agenda."

It may not want to drive the agenda, but good self-service can see an authority locked in a virtuous circle.

"Why do people use self service – is it because government is keen on channel shift? No, it’s because it’s easier for the individual," says Bole. "The way to achieve channel shift is by improving the quality of self-service."

In Kent, technology is enabling a new type of self service. The county is part of thewhole system demonstrator programme, where 6,000 people across Kent, Cornwall and Newham with long-term health conditions were monitored remotely using telehealth and telecare

The paradox of telehealth is that remote areas with sparse health services where the technology could be most beneficial, are often the very areas where communications infrastructure is least able to support it.

Kent’s broadband infrastructure is improving thanks to early and enthusiastic adoption of the public services network (PSN) within the county, a programme that began several years ago when the council needed to upgrade its network to a product offering more bandwidth.

Its local PSN project, known as KPSN, now has 1,200 sites onboard of which only 400 are the county council’s.

"In Kent, there are 132 exchanges, and most of them do not support a sufficient number of properties to create a commercial argument for the telecoms industry to invest in a presence in them.

"When we developed KPSN we looked for solutions that would require a presence [by telcos] in those telephone exchanges. As part of doing so we asked those companies, ‘Does it change your commercial model as you have to be in those sites anyway in order to deliver our solution?’ And we asked them to revisit their commercial model to the extent that we saw a 55% increase in the availability of business broadband in exchanges across Kent," Bole says.

Along with shared networks, the KPSN has laid the foundations for sharing of technology elsewhere, namely among the county’s datacentres, as the KPSN timetable chimed with the timing of Medway council’s move to a new HQ and accompanying datacentre at Chatham’s Gun Wharf.

"Originally, we were going to commission sufficient of the datacentre to meet our own needs and we agreed that we’d work in partnership [with Medway], and by investing jointly, we’ve opened up the whole facility for shared use by public services across Kent," Bole says.

"We’ve got both Kent county council and Medway council and some shared services between all of local government across Kent, as well as some primary care trusts interested in locating equipment at the site."

Kent is following in the footsteps of the government ICT strategy, he says. Having consolidated its networks and its datacentres, its next step is to see if the same can be done with software.

It’s currently looking at using a single two-factor authentication system across the council, with a number of agencies already standardised on a single product.

Bole hopes the Cabinet Office will create a common authentication system for use across government in the future.

But not all initiatives can be led from Whitehall, sometimes local government needs to go it alone.

"As good as the PSN initiative is, we have of course been talking about a national PSN solution for a number of years. If we hadn’t delivered something locally, we’d probably still be waiting," he says.